The profit rise was fueled mainly by strong performance from Barclay’s investment banking arm amid an uptick in dealmaking and financial market activity, The Independent reported Tuesday (July 28). This helped offset increased provisions Barclays made for potential bad debts.
The company’s earnings showed a pre-tax profit of 6.1 billion pounds (about $8.1 billion), up from 5.2 billion pounds (about $6.1 billion) during the same period last year and exceeding analyst projections of 5.9 billion (about $7.8 billion), the report said. Barclays attributed this to improved income across crucial divisions.
For example, the lender’s United Kingdom bank saw an 8% increase in income to 4.5 billion pounds (about $6 billion), while the investment bank’s income jumped 11% to 8 billion pounds (about $10.6 billion), according to the report.
In a speech accompanying the earnings report, Barclays CEO C.S. Venkatakrishnan discussed some business highlights, such as the bank’s consumer operation in the United States reaching more than 25 million customers without a single physical branch.
During the quarter, Barclays completed its purchase of Best Egg to bolster its consumer loan capabilities, and teamed with Samsung to help that company launch its U.S. credit card.
“Lastly, we are expanding and enhancing our branch network to meet the changing preferences of our customers,” Venkatakrishnan said in the speech. “Our segment-leading proposition for wealth customers in the U.K. also extends to providing low-cost, transparently constructed, risk-appropriate products to help them build their financial futures.”
In other banking news, banks have gone from viewing wire payments as back-office plumbing to considering them a competitive tool.
The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Rewiring Wires: Modernizing CHIPS and Fedwire® for a New Era of Demand” found that financial institutions are upgrading the systems that transmit large, time-sensitive payments as clients push for faster processing, better information and more reliable service.
“Banks can adopt cloud-based infrastructure, build systems that handle ISO 20022 data, spread workloads across multiple cloud providers and use APIs to connect payment platforms,” PYMNTS reported Tuesday. “Together, those steps can make wire payments more reliable, transparent and useful to clients while helping institutions compete in a faster payments market.”
